My fiancé vanished a week before our wedding and left me his ten children. Thirty years later a man I had never seen knocked on my door in the middle of Sunday lunch.

I met Leland Brack in the spring of 1994 and I was twenty-six and it was the easiest thing that has ever happened to me.

He was gentle and he was tired and he had ten children.

Their mother had died. That is what he told me and that is what everybody in Linford knew, and I never once had cause to question it.

Maud was eleven. Tilly was two. There were eight in between.

He asked me in the February of 1995 and I said yes before he had got the sentence out.

And one week before the wedding I woke up and he was not in that house.

I had the phone in my hand to ring the police when I saw a piece of paper on the kitchen table.

Six words.

I’m sorry. I can’t do this anymore.

He had not just gone from me. He had gone from all ten of them, and Tilly was two and Maud was eleven and the middle four did not understand what was being said to them.